New here. Worried about 4 year old son..

[Guest guest]

Hi everyone. This is my first post here although I've been reading

for a couple of days. My name is Aimee and I have a 4 year old son

that we fear may have Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis. I wanted to get

some others opinions about his symptoms. We of course are hoping

that he doesn't have this, but we are trying to prepare in case he

does.

first started having symptoms in August of last year. He woke

up one night crying and when we went to his room he said his legs

hurt. We couldn't see anything wrong and just assumed it was a cramp

or growing pains. This went on for several nights and we would give

him motrin and he would be ok in the morning. After 3-4 nights of

this, he said it hurt still in the morning. His preschool teachers

told us that day that he seemed to be in a lot of pain and he

started limping. We took him to the doctor and they examined him and

couldn't find anything noticably wrong. He had had strep throat

about 2-3 weeks before his legs first start hurting so they figured

it was just a reaction to that. They did run some blood tests and

told us the results were consistent with it being related to the

strep. It took 3 weeks for his legs to completely stop hurting.

During that time, he was definitely not himself. He didn't want to

play with his friends or do anything other than lay on the couch. It

was a really difficult time for him.

Right before Thanksgiving it happened again. One night he had a high

fever (we found out later that it was something going around school

as 4 kids were out the same day as also with a fever). The next

day he woke up crying. His leg hurt again. This time it was only his

left leg, mainly the knee. We gave him motrin and waited a day. The

pain got worse and he refused to walk on it. We took him back to the

doctor. They saw the limp and that he was in pain. But they told us

just to wait and it would resolve. They did run some more blood

tests. It took about a week to go away completely.

Then this past Tuesday he woke up in pain again. We gave him motrin

and he went to school. By lunchtime he was limping noticably and

refusing to do stairs or stand for long. We called the doctor and

they said that they thought it was time to get someone else to look

at it. They referred us to an orthopedic doctor. We had an

appointment with him on Wednesday. By then 's knee was swollen

and warm. They did an x-ray and said the bones looked great. The

physicians assistant and doctor both examined . Finally after a

long wait, the doctor came in and told us that after getting his

history, examining him and looking at our primary doctors notes and

the results of the blood testing, he believes that has JRA. He

ordered another set of blood tests which we had done that day and he

referred us to a pediatric rheumatologist. (We are fortunate that we

live near several large research hospitals and there are some in our

area). Of course there is a 2 month wait. Today his leg doesn't seem

to be bothering him as much so I think the total duration of this

incident will be only about 5 days. But the pain seemed much worse.

He was almost unable to walk on the worst day and definitely

couldn't do the stairs in our house. It just broke our heart

watching him in so much pain.

I do have the numbers from both blood tests, but they don't mean too

much to me. For his second incident the numbers that are not in the

expected range are

lymphocytes - 15.5 (L) Normal is 44-74

granulocytes - 78.1 (H) Normal is 23-62

GR# (??) - 7.4 (H) Normal is 1.4-6.6

and his sed rate was 21.

I don't have the results of the latest blood tests yet but I know

they ordered the ANA and the Rheumatoid Factor tests in addition to

the ones that were already done.

We don't know what to think.. It's very overwhelming thinking that

he might have this. He is just so young. So what do you guys

think? Anything else that might be causing his symptoms? We are

hoping to be able to move his appointment up.. they indicated this

might be a possibility. Will it matter if he isn't having any pain

when we meet with the rheumatoligist? I've heard it can take a long

time to officially diagnose this. Why is that? So many questions!

Thanks for any help or advice!